


When Pieces Fall Back into Place.

by RidleyMocki



Series: Piece by Bloody Piece. [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bit of violence and blood but nothing in depth, Character Development, Distinct but similar AU, Emotional Support, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Memory Loss, Memory Related, Past Brainwashing, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovered Memories, Repressed Memories, Sleepy Cuddles, Waking up in the middle of the night, War, but everything's still kind of new....
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-22 23:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2526125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RidleyMocki/pseuds/RidleyMocki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky wakes in the middle of the night when a memory of something he did, years ago and on Hydra's orders, comes crashing back into his mind. This is an account of what he goes through nearly every night, the waking, the solitary battle in his head, piecing clues together, and ultimately wrapping himself up in the arms and support of the one man that has kept the real Bucky alive, Steve Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Pieces Fall Back into Place.

**Author's Note:**

> Set post Captain America: the Winter Soldier (movie) sometime after Cap found Bucky again after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.  
> They are definitely together but everything is still new, and romancing is not as big a priority as making sure each other are okay. Bucky's struggles to remember his life and both of the two soldier's mental trauma means that their relationship can get tumultuous. So they savour the moments in the early morning when it comes so easily. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy. xx

_The man scrambled back across the floor until his back was flush with the wall. The Asset advanced in slow, even steps._

_“No, please! I’ll give you anything! Money, power… No, please don’t! I beg you!”_

_The moonlit shadows from the window lattice threw a grid over the man’s face. He clutched at his heart, it must have been racing._

_“Please…” He whispered._

_The Asset raised his gun, a silencer securely attached. Outside, the rain throttled the window and the wind was howling._

_He fired._

*************************************************************************************************************************************

Bucky’s mind came hurtling back into consciousness. But the dream didn’t let go – there was more to remember. He lay totally still, eyes yet closed, and focused. He saw red. Slick red, wet and shining. Blood. The man’s body had slumped sideways to the floor, painting the wall with gore on its way down. The Asset holstered his weapon, a pause, and the memory dissolved, and just like always, no matter how hard Bucky tried to chase it in his head, tried to find out more, the trail went cold and anything either side of it remained a mystery. 

He hadn’t moved, letting the random flashes of recollection play out unhindered. But there was no chance of going back to sleep now. He slowly, apprehensively opened his eyes. White walls, windows on one side, white ceiling. He flicked his eyes down. A large Howling Commandos art print hung on the wall, all red and sepia tones.

Good, he was still here, he was still home. 

Every single time he woke, between his mind waking up and when he finally opened his eyes, Bucky was wracked with a horrible suspicion that when he did eventually open his eyes to look, he would be somewhere else to where he was when they closed. Somewhere terrifyingly familiar. Until he looked, he could never be sure. Unless, of course, he could hear Steve snoring.

_Steve._

Another customary pang of fear gripped Bucky and he jerked his head to the side. But Steve was there, sleeping obliviously opposite him on the mattress, curled up on his stomach and face squished unceremoniously into the pillow.

Bucky watched him in silence, the soft expansions of his chest in the deep breaths of sleep were the only thing to suggest that the room was not at that moment a frozen snapshot in time. The more he watched, the more a small sense of peace spread within his chest, assuaging the violent turmoil left there by the memory. Watching Steve’s tranquil, albeit squished up face, Bucky was grateful that this had not been one of the nights when he woke screaming.

Sighing, Bucky winced internally at the sudden pain of his rib cage expanding beyond what it had had to when he was asleep. He sat up and realised that the old t-shirt he wore to bed was now soaked through with sweat. _Oh joy_. As he swung his legs off the edge of the mattress he pulled the shirt over his head and threw it with his left arm to the laundry hamper in the corner. It lands perfectly in the middle. 

Bucky gets up and walks shirtless over to the windows. Steve’s apartment sits moderately high up in the building and hence makes a decent vantage point to play voyeur on the city below. Of course when Bucky had first come here, he had identified this window as a good vantage point in a much darker context, as he had been trained to habitually do, before slamming such thoughts down deep where they couldn’t get out. But the city was curiously quiet at the moment, a low level hum engulfing the usually thrumming Washington DC. It must be some truly obscure hour, and sure enough when Bucky looked over Steve’s shoulder to the clock on the nightstand, he discovered it was 3:48 in the morning. No wonder it was quiet, with everyone probably unconscious Bucky felt like the only soul stirring in the whole city.

He drew his eyes back from the clock to Steve’s shoulder, and by natural consequence his arm, and neck, and chest, and stomach. Even from this distance, across the room Steve’s sheer mass impressed his presence upon the air, and Bucky still felt like he was close. The blonde American dream still hadn’t stirred, beyond comfortable in his tight, standard issue, white cotton t-shirt. Bucky breathed heavily as his heart stirred. The garment was a staple in Steve’s wardrobe, it’s timeless simplicity serving him well in the transition between centuries. Bucky’s attitude towards Steve’s tight white t-shirts would shift rapidly between deep appreciation for their constricting fit, to downright frustration at exactly how accentuating that fit could be.

Currently in the general mood of being frustrated, Bucky strode over to the door and passed out of the bedroom, making a beeline for the kitchen. As he stared into the fridge his mind couldn’t focus – it was frantic and lethargic all at the same time. 

“Fucking t-shirt”, he muttered as he grabbed the milk carton and gently shut the fridge door.

Pouring himself a tall glass, trying to think of what he could do to occupy himself at this hour, Bucky winced when – purely from instinct – he grabbed the drink with his left hand. The collision of each metal finger on the glass made a quick series of high-pitched _clink_ noises that sounded out into the silence of the obscenely early morning. He always forgot about that, and swore internally, but relaxed when he didn’t hear any stirring from the other room. 

Standing in the kitchen drinking the cool but offensively low fat milk, Bucky finally made himself think about the memory. It was a new one. Sometimes they repeated themselves, adding detail by tiny detail, but this was brand new and completely without context. The begging man had obviously been a target, and he spoke English, but was not American. There was a slight European accent, so slight Bucky couldn’t place it. He must have thought the man that had come to kill him spoke English – a surprising amount of tact for someone scrambling across a floor begging for life, Bucky thought before shaking his head, denying that side of himself from creeping up again. The man’s suit had been a dark brown, woollen, three-piece. It looked like something from the seventies or maybe the early eighties. 

The room they had been in seemed domestic, but it was definitely an office, an unorganised and stately leather desk had been off to the side in his peripheral vision, and there was the distinct smell of book paper. Above where... where the blood had smeared…on the wall… _dammit, what was that?_ Bucky strained his mind, the glass of milk hovering centimetres from his lips. _Newspaper_. A newspaper clipping – it looked like a front page – hanging perfectly in a frame. There was a photo, the target shaking hands with another man near a lectern of the kind they use at press conferences. _No not the ‘target’, the man, god dammit_. Bucky took another swig of milk and focused again. The headline, in big, black, bold typeface – what was it? He paused again, his mind chasing the coat tails of the memory for everything it was worth. _German_. The headline had been in German. Bucky couldn’t remember exactly what it said; he didn’t remember what the headline was so much as he knew that, at the time, his brain had known it was German. The man’s accent could very well have had a German twinge.

Bucky downed the last two fingers of milk and placed the glass in the sink, this time wary of the noise from metal upon crystal. He leaned against the bench and repeated a mental checklist in his head. In the morning, the actual morning when everyone else was awake, he would have to go searching for records of an assassination in the nineteen-seventies to early eighties on German soil in the home and personal office of a possibly German politician, businessman, or influential figure. And a storm, he remembered the howling wind, the assassination would have been on a stormy night. How lyrical. Hopefully it wasn’t a story from the former East Germany, any records from that era could prove to be quite elusive. 

Satisfied with his brief detective work, and beyond eager to abandon the memory and get that glittering red out of his mind, Bucky deliberated for a moment as to whether to watch television or go back to bed. Feeling a slight chill on his shirtless chest, his mind inevitably wandered back to the illegally tight t-shirt on the man sleeping in the next room. _Bed, definitely_. 

He opened the door tentatively, and found that the meatball of a man had rolled onto Bucky’s side of the bed, and was now asleep on his back with his arms outstretched, gently snoring and jawline tipped up towards the heavens. It was warmer in here than the kitchen, but Bucky couldn’t tell if that was a real sensation or merely sentimental bias. He moved over to the bed and carefully crawled lengthways across it, settling down on his side and gently resting his head on Steve’s stomach. With their bodies making a right angle, and Bucky facing the headboard, he could despite the rise and fall of the other man’s body, stare in quiet satisfaction at the super soldier’s face. 

After a few seconds he rose in frustration, reached for a spare pillow, and shoved it underneath him. He had been lying on his left arm, which for all its perks, could not serve the same pillowy purpose of comfort as the flesh of his right arm whenever he lay on it. The metal arm’s advantage, however, was that it would never go to sleep under his weight or lose circulation. Satisfied with the addition of the pillow between this flank and the cool metal, Bucky rested again on Steve’s stomach, and tried not to scratch the other man’s skin with his by now shamefully unkempt stubble. 

He had, when he had not been himself, but just _the Asset_ , been accustomed to letting his hair grow until it was cumbersome and superiors ordered that it be awkwardly and sometimes harshly cut. Bucky was as used to peeking out at the world from behind the locks of his hair as he was to doing so from behind his mask. It was nearly at shoulder length now, and he only rarely tied it up, on the days when he felt particularly resilient and at ease. His facial hair was a similar story, except that in addition, Bucky hated shaving. For one thing it seemed like such a painfully quotidian thing to do, to make oneself presentable for polite society, it felt like he was pretending at being normal and doing it for others’ sake, but while they were telling him to do it for himself – the whole thing seemed disingenuous. But also, more significantly, when Bucky shaved and made his cheeks, jaw, and throat boyishly smooth, if he pulled back his hair, there was little to distinguish him from the starry-eyed young man that had gone to war in 1945. 

But he was not that man, and the depiction of him in the Howling Commandos print on the bedroom wall, standing proudly in his double-breasted jacket, utterly clean shaven, seemed like the portrait of an ancestor. His own personal prequel. But more painfully than the alienation from his own past, when Bucky was clean shaven these days, he would walk out of the bathroom and meet Steve’s eye, and in them would be the recognition of the James Barnes from Brooklyn that Steve had known. When Steve saw Bucky’s clean face, he saw the friend to whom he’d said goodbye on a bridge in Germany seventy years ago. 

Bucky couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t let Steve believe that any part of his original friend was still alive, just repressed down inside. It was a knowledge that burdened Bucky every second of every day: that that man was dead, destroyed in the process of being morphed into something else. Even if he did manage to regain all his memories of his life before, he could never go back to being that man. And it was a fear that gripped his insides and splintered icily into his heart, to think that that was everything Steve actually wanted. But Bucky could not forget the memories that returned to him of what Hydra had done, the systematic dehumanisation that irrevocably ripped away his identity, his soul even, in ways Steve could never know. And shaving his face until he looked again like Steve’s childhood friend, felt like erasing it all and giving the soldier false hope. It was cruel.

Bucky’s mind hurtled back to reality, drawing him back out from his thoughts, and when his eyes focused on the face of the man there with him, Bucky squeezed them shut, willing the anxiety away. Sometimes he wondered if it would have been better to leave the door to his emotions firmly plastered over. Finally his mind went quiet and the only sound to be heard was Steve breathing, and the steady pace of his heartbeat reverberating through his body to Bucky’s ear, pressed against his belly. It was regular, predictable, soothingly so. Bucky relaxed his eyelids and just listened, letting the rhythm ease his mind back into some semblance of calm. _One two, pause, one two, pause. Breathe in, breathe out, in, out._

Without warning a hand came to rest on the side of Bucky’s head, and his eyes flew open. Blue eyes were peering at him from under sleepy, hooded lids. 

“Buck”.

A hitch of a smile flashed across Steve’s lips. Bucky let out a long sigh as the deep voice vibrated in the body beneath him, and leant his head into the touch of Steve’s hand.

“Yeah”.

“You alright?”, Steve asked lightly, wary of how displays of concern would make Bucky uncomfortable. But Bucky had promised, in any case, never to hide things from Steve.

“More memories, nothing too bad, but woke me up all the same.”

A pause.

“Which kind?”

“Category 2”.

Category 2 was the classification the two men had given to the memories of what Bucky himself had done upon orders from Hydra. Category 1 described the memories that came back to Bucky of all the things Hydra had done to _him_ , Category 3 was memories from his life before he fell from the train in 1945, and Category 4 was for all the seemingly random, out of context recollections: innocuous information from a target’s file; random encounters with television content; the public conversations he’d overhear while deployed on a mission, and so on. Categorising the memories as they came back gave Bucky a sense of order and control.

Warm fingers burrowed under Bucky’s hair and combed gently.

“Was it bad?”, Steve asked, dropping all pretence, his face creasing with worry.

Bucky paused, looked away from the man’s gaze, made a deep intake of breath and met his eyes again. It did not help.

“I shot a man in the head in his own home, I think in Germany, at least twenty years ago”, he blurted.

Bucky bit his lip, and Steve’s frown deepened, but he waited for Bucky to speak. 

“It was raining”, he said finally.

Bucky moved his mouth into what he intended to be a reassuring smile, but it came out strangled, twisted into a pained grimace. Steve’s fingers moved from Bucky’s hair to rest on his cheek, and his thumb passed back and forth across the prickly flesh. 

“Oh shit, Buck. I’m sorry”, he said, and moved his hand to grip Bucky firmly on the shoulder, kneading the muscle in slow circles.

“Like I said, Stevie, it wasn’t that bad… in comparison…”.

The use of his nickname jerked a quick smile from Steve’s lips, and he relaxed a little, as Bucky would not have used it had he truly not been alright.

“I can come with you to look for records today, if you want”.

Bucky nodded slowly.

“If it won’t make you uncomfortable”.

“I’d be more uncomfortable knowing you were digging up that kind of thing alone”, was the immediate reply.

Bucky smiled, making sure to insert more warmth. He knew that Steve would be able to pull him out of his head if they looked for records together. Steve knew Bucky would get lost inside his mind, but he thought what happened was that searching for the records of his own atrocities made Bucky depressed or overly guilty. It was the opposite: it made him lose his grip on emotional, human response altogether. The last time Bucky had looked alone for evidence of his crimes – the sniper shooting of a Yugoslavian democrat and Nobel Peace Prize winner in ’92 – he became more desensitised to it all the more he looked and dwelt on the recently recovered memories. He started slipping back into being the Asset, the weapon, the automated machine. Without thinking, when he eventually found the record he had smiled mirthlessly, coldly, at the accuracy of his own shot with the sniper rifle. It startled him when he realised, the ease of it. It was like going back to a default setting, and he felt uneasy and hyper vigilant for days after.

“Fair enough”, was all he said, though.

Steve’s hand moved from Bucky’s shoulder and down to stroke his spine. He was just so _big_ , Bucky thought, he could reach anywhere. The slow strokes sent little electric sparks all through his nerves.

Bucky turned his head slightly and nuzzled the abdominal muscles of Steve’s stomach, sinfully accentuated in the white t-shirt. And when Steve’s hand left his back to curl around Bucky’s right hand, tucked under his chest, Bucky felt his heart swell and squeezed back. He closed his eyes against Steve’s stomach and breathed deeply, the clean-cut smell of the one constant person in his life rushing to overwhelm him, the heat of that flesh warming his exposed face.

And then Steve was pulling at his hand.

“Come here”, he whispered. 

Bucky slithered up the bed and into the crook of Steve’s arm, belly against his side, head hovering just centimetres away from calm blue eyes. And as Bucky rolled he made sure his metal fingers lifted the t-shirt slightly and brushed the skin underneath, feeling the muscles startle and Steve’s breath hitch at the cold touch. 

One arm curled around Bucky’s waist and pulled him closer, while Steve’s free hand came to rest on his cheek. 

Steve raised his head and kissed Bucky softly. It was sweet but brimming with feeling, their noses brushing and breath mingling. Each microsecond was a blessing of a memory that Bucky tried to lock safely away, deep down where he might keep it forever. When their lips broke, Steve pecked a final soft kiss on Bucky’s bottom lip, like a signature. The blonde wonderboy sighed contentedly as Bucky’s face broke into a brief grin, and for a few moments the two just savoured the closeness.

“You can wake me up when it happens, you know, when something comes back”. Steve said, his voice low.

“I know. But sometimes I know it won’t help, so I don’t. Plus, sometimes I feel better just watching you sleep.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow.

“You watch me sleep?”

“Not creepily, Steve. You’re just completely peaceful. It’s so opposite to what’s going on in my head”.

“You mean my face was so squished and ridiculous that it made you laugh?”, Steve poked teasingly.

“It was very squished. But no. You’re just… beautiful.”

Bucky brought his hand up and ran his fingers through the other man's clean blonde hair. Steve became very still and watched Bucky with wide eyes.

“You’re beautiful all over, Stevie”. 

Steve’s mouth opened slightly and his eyebrows rose, the candidness of Bucky's compliment sucking the breath from his lungs.

“Of course then you wake up”, said Bucky straight-faced, “And you go back to being an asshole”.

The hand at his waist dug its fingers into Bucky’s side and he folded up in defense, Steve grinning and chuckling under his breath. Bucky was laughing too, to his surprise, but in the silent way where a smile was on his face and his chest was wracking with stifled breaths of laughter.

“Yeah, well,” Steve was saying, “you can watch this asshole sleep whenever you want”.

Calming down, Bucky placed his chin on Steve’s chest and breathed heavily. He stared into big blue eyes from between the messy locks of hair over his face.

“Thank you”, he said, the phrase carrying a significance beyond their current conversation.

A few moments of silence had passed when Steve’s hand gripped the other man’s waist, and he rolled the both of them onto their sides so they were facing each other, chest against chest, in the middle of the bed. Steve shifted again to entwine his legs with Bucky’s, and the two men laced their arms around each other, as close as physical space would allow.

“Any time”, said Steve, and gently nudged Bucky’s nose with his own. Both the men’s eyes were closed, lost in each other’s proximity. 

“It’s twenty past four”, Steve whispered, “do you think you could sleep for a few hours?”

Bucky deliberated that himself, but finding his mind quieter than before, he nodded once.

“Okay then”, Steve said.

Steve stretched his neck and brushed his lips against Bucky’s eyelids, placing a soft kiss on each darkly shadowed lid. One, two. Bucky had stopped breathing, and when Steve lowered his head again, Bucky captured the soldier’s lips in his own and held him transfixed. The kiss was deep this time, barely containing the hot and rampant emotion coursing in Bucky’s breast, seizing his throat. The feeling flared and bit as Steve pushed back, eager and wanting. Their lips opened, tongues meeting but only just. When the kiss broke it made way for a series of short, tender kisses; riding the high as the wave of feeling ebbed and became calm. 

Steve exhaled, his breath shaky, and nuzzled into Bucky’s neck, making himself small to bury his face in the exposed flesh. It made Bucky’s heart swell to envelop Steve with his whole body like this. For all his brokenness and demons, when it was Steve cocooning himself into Bucky’s hold, Bucky felt strong, his mission to protect, to keep safe, to comfort. Steve was the only person who thought Bucky was strong enough to comfort someone else, and not just need it himself.

Bucky kissed Steve on the head through his blonde, almost golden hair, and breathed the scent of him like one does when returning to something beautifully familiar. 

“Sleep tight”, he said.

Steve nestled in under Bucky’s throat and kissed the bare flesh beneath his collarbone.

“Night”, he mumbled.

They fell asleep like that, curled in on each other, as they had time and time again when the bizarreness of the early morning let Bucky drop his guard, let him feel without reservation. In sleep they breathed each other’s breath, were warmed by each other’s heat, and it would not have been irrational to suppose that in some way, the restful quiet of one imparted the same in the other. For Bucky did not wake again until late morning, was not ripped from slumber by violent recollection, but stayed entwined in the man beside him. The man that had always been beside him. 

If Bucky had seen the peaceful repose fixed upon his own face as he slept in Steve’s arms, he would never have dared to believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Yay! You read the thing! Thanks so much you're the best. Have a cookie *dumps entire tin of cookies into your lap*.
> 
> Guess what? This is my first ever fanfic! Thank for reading and I hoped you enjoyed. This fic is mainly about character development and exploration of the complexity within the two men's personalities, I hope I did that well for you guys.
> 
> I'm thinking of making this into a whole universe with prequels and sequels to this one with a broader plot and some resolutions for Bucky. Maybe the prequel of how Steve came to find Buck again after S.H.I.E.L.D's collapse, and sequels where they do find the records of the German assassination and others. I would incorporate other Marvel characters and really flesh it all out.
> 
> SO PLEASE PLEASE tell me what you THINK!! Because I'd love to hear your thoughts, it will really help me decide what to do next. And if you liked this fic please drop a kudos, I'll love you forever. 
> 
> Thanks so much, you guys are awesome. :D xx


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